Q&A: Ben Gibbard

If you give people a series of choices, they may or may not sell, or they're not going to sell 60 million records. But it's like, there will be room for 100 bands of a similar ilk to at least be able to have enough money to pay their rent and to make another record. At the end of the day, everybody that I know that played music, that's all they ever wanted. That's all any of us ever wanted — was just to be able to make enough money to continue doing this. I still have friends who have been slogging around for 10 years who are playing to 600 people at a club down the street and they're fucking stoked. I highly doubt that anybody who comes from this culture of indie rock, when given an opportunity to make a living and play to hundreds if not thousands of people in the bigger cities is going to be bitter that a band like us or the Shins or Arcade Fire are playing to 4,000 people in particular cities. It's hard to kind of complain about the demise of the music industry when there are more bands out there on the road playing shows and people are patronizing them than before.

Do you have an artist who you at crossroads moments you think "What would so-and-so do?"
I guess in a way we do. For all of us, it was always R.E.M. It was always like, "What would REM do in this situation?" The antiquity that R.E.M. existed in that took them through the IRS years onto Warner Bros. and then onto international superstardom — it's neither possible or even relevant today. When we sat down and thought about signing to a major label, we could either be every indie band ever and wait another record to sign to a major label when it's not the right time or try to do what R.E.M. did. And we were like, "Let's try to stick to the R.E.M. model of sign while the getting's good." But it's also not applicable. I remember there were moments along our radio push for Plans when we'd end up in really compromising situations and I'd be asking management, "Is this what R.E.M. had to go through in ?88?" And they're like, "No. You can't even make those comparisons." There will never be another Elvis Costello. Never be another R.E.M. Because so many of the perceptions of those people's careers are based in the time period which they were making music. I mean, Conor [Oberst] was getting all that shit with like, "He's the new Bob Dylan!" No, he's not. There's not going to be another Bob Dylan. Conor is one of the most genius songwriters I know. But there's no such thing as the next Bob Dylan. No such thing as the next Beatles. These are just foolish things to throw around because they don't have any merit.